I find myself in a slightly hypocritical position. The scurrilous squib I write and edit uses bad language aplenty, albeit slightly more inventively and amusingly, I hope, than did yesterday's G2 cover. It is also cruelly nasty about complacent figures and fixers in the trendy art establishment, such as Gillian Wearing, in the same way that the television programmes implicitly criticised in her cover encourage what is for me unwatchable nastiness between their contestants. So I'm in no position to preach, but there again...

Opening the paper, I was immediately disappointed to discover that we haven't yet progressed beyond the stage of adolescent shock tactics used by artists apparently desperate to get themselves noticed at all costs. What is truly shocking is not the cover's content, which is pathetic, but the fact that an artist can still think that such a strategy is provocative, for this was clearly the only possible intention.

Let's get the language out of the way: it isn't shocking or offensive. The word that got Bill Grundy sacked from his television job in 1976 is now a common enough garnish in good newspapers and the better weeklies, especially - curiously - the conservative ones. It is also frequently used on late-night radio and television and is the exclamation of choice among all, and I mean all, homebound schoolchildren on the 73 bus to Stoke Newington. It is not a word I use in front of my children (15 and nine years old) but one that they use as often as they can get away with in front of me - usually a minimum of half a dozen times a day. In short, this is not a word I personally encourage, but if you are shocked by seeing it in print I suggest you roll with the times and try to make it work for you. That horse has bolted.

As a statement written by an artist it misfires. There is no figurative loading of the words, no clever twist. Merely lazy, it looks too much like an idea that ought to have been spiked on its first uttering. Neither is it funny. Perhaps as Guardian readers we are spoiled by the enviable ingenuity of the headline-writing in our paper.

Most of all, it surprised me because it is by someone not entirely negligible as an artist and who is, despite her own manful efforts to demonstrate the opposite, not an airhead - like one or two others one could mention in the fashionable art firmament. Indeed, she is one of few artists working in video who have produced stimulating and informative short films that wouldn't be out of place in the five-minute, avant-garde slots on Channel 4. When a serious newspaper commissions an artist to design a cover, we have every right to expect better than this and to demand something at least left-field, if not refreshingly original. Otherwise what's the point?

Gillian Wearing is a Turner prize-winner, the recipient of major shows at major public galleries and of at least two National Touring Exhibitions. She is also a trustee of the Tate: so important is she as an artist that Sir Nicholas Serota himself reports to Gillian Wearing. Is this really the best she could do? And what will posterity make of this feeble effort by one of our allegedly finest artists?

One further observation. As far as the cover's peripheral design is concerned, it occurs to me that Wearing is a typical "Young British Artist": she can't even colour in.